"An intellectual memoir by the author of the acclaimed Imagined Communities. Benedict Anderson is one of the leading historians of nationalism and Southeast Asia. His seminal book Imagined Communities has changed the way we think about the reason that people live, die and kill in the name of nationhood. Born in China, Anderson spent his childhood in California and Ireland, was educated in England and finally found a home at Cornell University, where...

The Legacy of Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) - as writer, teacher and conservationist - once moved Edward Abbey to declare him "the only living American worthy of the Nobel." Unequaled in the American literature of place, his Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction created an entirely new consciousness of the American West. As director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, Stegner wielded a powerful influence on many of the most important writers...

But Benson's book is as much a consideration of Stegner's own literary legacy as it is a blow-by-blow retelling of his life. Providing a critical reassessment of the entire body of Stegner's work, Benson argues convincingly for his subject's place in the literary canon - and not merely as a "regional" Western writer, but quite simply as one of the great writers of twentieth-century American letters, whose books can stand comfortably on the shelf beside...